Holiday eCommerce spending will break through $100 billion in 2017 in the U.S. alone, according to a study released today by Adobe. That’s almost 14% year-over-year growth. In addition, Cyber Monday will hit $6.6 billion in sales alone, even though Black Friday will have better deals.

And mobile, at last, has surpassed desktop, in at least one way.

Smartphone plus tablet e-commerce visits to retail sites will account for 54% of all visits, Adobe says, while desktop drops to 46%. In 2015, desktop accounted for 55% of all visits, while in 2016 it was 50%. Mobile has already far surpassed desktop in web use generally, but buying has been a special use case: people have tended to like more screen space.

Total sales, Adobe estimates, will be $107.4 billion.

Black Friday will account for $5 billion of that, up 16.4% from last year, while Cyber Monday’s $6.6 billion will see an almost-identical 16.5% year-over-year growth.

Interestingly, people shop last-minute for more than just Christmas presents. According to Adobe’s numbers, which capture 80% of online transactions at the 100 largest U.S. web retailers, the three hours from 8PM to 11PM on Cyber Monday bring in more revenue than an entire average day.

In other words, retailers better prepare their servers for an onslaught.

The shift to mobile devices is expected and normal, but retailers need to be aware that the customer journey is not simple. Many will view items on their mobile devices but only purchase on their desktop or laptop computers.

Order value and conversion rates for desktop, tablet, and smartphone orders.

That’s not a problem, according to Adobe.

“For many retailers, the data will show that intent focused on discovery (e.g., product research), physical store information and customer service inquiries are some of the top activities,” Adobe director of mobile product and strategy Roger Woods told me via email. “If the experience is delivered to make sure these are done very well, respecting the users time and intent, mobile will be a key entry point for consumers to seal the deal on another channel—be it desktop or in person. In some instances, these can be stitched together, where a cart started on mobile can be finished on a laptop at work.”

Interestingly, conversion rates are higher on mobile sites for smaller retailers, who might be more nimble in taking advantage of modern technology. Small retailers convert buyers at 1.9% on smartphones, compared to 1.6% for large and 1.3% for medium-sized businesses. Desktop rates are higher, at 3.4 to 4.9%.

The most anticipated gifts of the season?

Nerf guns and Apple AirPods lead the toys and consumer electronics lists, while Super Mario Odyssey and Nintendo Switch lead the games and console lists.

Adobe’s report, analysis, and predictions are based on analysis of one trillion visits to 4,500 retail e-commerce sites with 55 million products and more than 6 million orders per day from November to December.

One thing Adobe’s report does not include: mobile commerce via apps.

Half of American online shoppers use Amazon’s app, for instance, and that’s significant not only because Amazon specifically could account for up to half of U.S. e-commerce sales in 2017 alone and has an aggregate of over 750 million mobile users across all of its apps, but also because mobile apps have the potential to deliver the kind of desktop-quality experience that mobile web still struggles, in some cases, to provide.

And that will just extend the mobile advantage even more.

Special thanks to John Koetsier, Contributor at Forbes, for sharing this article.

The recent revelation that Wal-Mart plans to pour $2 billion into E-Commerce over the next two years brought back memories of past digital transformation intersections; both those roads taken, and perhaps more infamously, those not. Wal-Mart also reported, not coincidently, that profits were trending downward against flat sales expected in 2016. The market responded with a 9% drop in its stock price, effectively wiping out $20 billion in market cap.

“There’s a perception in the world that Wal-Mart is playing catch-up to Target and Amazon, especially in e-commerce innovation,” said Jim Davidson, head of research at Bronto, a marketing company.

Priorities for Wal-Mart’s new spending include continued work on fulfillment centers, with four new facilities slated to open in southern California, Florida and Texas in an effort to bridge its digital and physical operations. Wal-Mart also plans to improve its mobile app, in a broader push to work on customer experience, and to invest in Chinese online commerce company Yihaodian acquired this past June.

“People in the technology industry have been predicting that brick-and-mortar-based businesses like Wal-Mart are going to end up really struggling, and I think that that’s actually now coming to the fore in this powerful way today,” Founders Fund partner Geoff Lewis said.

Former Office Depot CEO Steve Odland noted that Amazon is growing 77% in contrast to Wal-Mart’s anticipated flat sales performance. “That story tells it all. They’re getting killed by the Internet and they don’t have any choice but to invest this billion dollars into trying to create their e-commerce business,” he told Squawk Alley.

After years of investing in driving efficiencies around inventory optimization, supply chain management and logistics, the focus is changing.” At this point, the technology investment that they need is one to drive growth, to drive sales growth with consumers, and they are sort of massively handicapped on that score,” said Lewis. The company now must contend not just with Amazon, he said, but also emerging private e-commerce firms like Wish — which Founders Fund is invested in — and Jet.com.

E-Commerce and the Kodak Moment

As noted earlier, what is being touted as the “eCommerce tipping point” is really just another chapter in the cautionary tale known as the “Kodak Moment”. Once used to describe the capturing of a memorable lifetime moment on film, the phrase now refers to a B-school case study that details Kodak’s failure as a company to recognize that digital photography, disruptive technologies and related business transformations represented the future.

We could very easily argue that another such eCommerce tipping point came when the once mighty Blockbuster Video failed to recognize the consumer’s distaste for late fees and desire to shop for content online – first in the form of DVD deliveries and eventually as subscription-based streaming services. Blockbuster management famously had the opportunity to acquire Netflix in 2000 for $50 million and begin adopting a new business model, but did not – Blockbuster is gone and Netflix is now worth $43 BILLION!

The pundits tend to get hung up on the “disruptive” technologies angle when the real driver remains the customer – their response to new platforms and channels as well as their preferred ways of interacting with a brand or business. Leadership that fails to trend spot, innovate and transform is doomed to repeat the mistakes of Kodak, Blockbuster, RIM and many others.

Will Wal-Mart experience this same fate? Is the planned investment of $2 billion in eCommerce too little, too late? To both, we would have to say “no”. It isn’t as if they just realized that they can and should sell online. As recently as 2014, Wal-Mart was listed as the Number 4 online retailer with $12.2 billion in revenue. The issue is that said revenue number represented only 2.5% of total sales and Wal-Mart has had a history of being reactive vs. proactive in this space.

For example, the realization that 70% of traffic to Walmart.com came from mobile devices during the 2014 holiday period sparked plans for a greater push into mobile in coming years – they should have understood the importance and acted on the promise of mobile eCommerce as early as 2011. They aren’t doomed but they are behind the curve.

The Importance of E-Commerce and Trends to Expect in 2016

If you listen to the founder of DBG, who has built game-changing digital businesses on behalf of Panasonic, Royal Caribbean Cruises, TracFone Wireless, Sony Music and more, eCommerce has been mission-critical for the past 20 years.

Simply put, you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. In fact, the proliferation of Internet-enabled devices (IoT) and related communications / commerce capabilities will allow said genie to explore places never before imagined. Consumers and businesses, alike, have had more than just a taste of instant gratification and they have an insatiable craving for more. Why would I want to go to a physical store when access to everything I might want or need sits in the palm of my hand?

Or does it? To date, facilitating instant gratification with a physical product is only in an experimental phase – Amazon drones, 3D printers, and more traditional forms of same-day delivery. As eBay concluded after recently shutting down its eBay Now service that was offered in limited markets, “same-day delivery makes more sense for items such as diapers or groceries, which aren’t core eBay categories like collectibles and used items”. Same-day delivery is an amazingly complex challenge but one that Wal-Mart might be best suited to tackle thanks to its product offerings and expertise in supply chain.

Global eCommerce represents a very real opportunity – and threat.

From brand awareness and customer acquisition perspectives, data-driven and intent-based retargeting will continue to deliver results. According to The National Center for Biotechnology Information, the average adult attention span is only 8.25 seconds. As a result, repetitively targeting the right audience member in creative ways will satisfy the Rule of 7 – number of touches required to remember a brand or sell on a B2B basis. In fact, CTRs associated with retargeting are 3-10X that of broader digital advertising.

More mobile, please! Not only will mobile continue to increase its share of search and shopping, but adoption of responsive design and innovations in merchandising (e.g. upload a picture of yourself from your phone and see how you look in those glasses, how your car looks with those rims or your living room walls look with that paint) will improve conversion rates, thus increasing total sales attributed to mobile commerce.

Speaking of mobile, omnichannel retailers and direct-to-consumer (DTC) manufacturers will be able to map, learn from and capitalize on the true multichannel / multi-device / multi-site customer journey courtesy of enhancements to cross-channel customer experience, communications and data analytics solutions. The expanded picture and understanding of the consumer will lead to greater share of mind, heart and wallet.

From a talent perspective, successful eCommerce players in 2016 will hire or otherwise engage specialists in consumer interaction innovation and revenue growth. Finding new ways to engage customers (acquisition, retention and lifetime value extension) as well as identifying new monetization methods are both of paramount importance to the overall sustainability and success of your eCommerce or omnichannel business.

Avoiding that Kodak Moment and building a wildly successful and sustainable eCommerce or omnichannel business requires vision, fortitude and expertise. Are you ready to grow your business? Contact us for a complimentary consultation.

With our powerful pedigree in strategy, prospective clients sometimes ask why we at DBG continue to offer design and development as a service line. Besides the fact that doing so allows us to meet our aspirations of being a full service agency, fostering a design-centric approach truly facilitates our primary mission of delivering integrated, results-based strategy and innovation on behalf of our clients and the customers that they serve.

That being said, we were very pleased to see that the Harvard Business Review dedicated its September 2015 issue to the topic of design thinking and its impact on devising business strategies. Adi Ignatius opens the conversation with the following “Design as Strategy” summary:

Design thinking isn’t new, but many companies still aren’t sure how it can improve their business. This month’s Spotlight illustrates some of the ways design thinking is starting to power corporate strategy.

Design Thinking in the C-Suite

If design is really about deeply understanding people and then strategizing around that, we need design leaders with broad skills. Corporate executives often don’t understand that there are different kinds of design: There is brand design. There is industrial design. There is UX and experience design. And there is innovation in strategy. So, you need a leader who can manage all the different phases of design in a very smart way—someone with a holistic vision.

– Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo Chief Design Officer

The emphasis on design clearly is moving to the C-suite, and more and more organizations are creating a chief design officer role. A notable example is PepsiCo, which poached Mauro Porcini from 3M to inject design thinking into nearly every aspect of the business.

Sustainable competitive advantage is fleeting. The cycles are shortened. The rule used to be that you’d reinvent yourself once every 7 to 10 years. Now it’s every 2 to 3 years. There’s constant reinvention: how you do business, how you deal with the customer.

– Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo CEO

Design-Centric Organizational Cultures

How should companies think about design centricity? For Jon Kolko, vice president of design at Blackboard, design thinking can define the way an organization functions at the most basic levels—how it relates to users, how it prototypes products, how it assesses risk. In “Design Thinking Comes of Age,” Kolko says that companies today must contend with unprecedented technological and business complexity and that design can help simplify and humanize complex systems.

The pursuit of design isn’t limited to large brand-name corporations like IBM or GE; the big strategy-consulting firms are also gearing up for this new world, often by acquiring leading providers of design services. In the past few years, Deloitte acquired Doblin, Accenture acquired Fjord, and McKinsey acquired Lunar. Olof Schybergson, the founder of Fjord, views design thinking’s empathetic stance as fundamental to business success.

A design-centric culture transcends design as a role, imparting a set of principles to all people who help bring ideas to life. Let’s consider those principles:

Focus on users’ experiences, especially their emotional ones – to build empathy with users, a design-centric organization empowers employees to observe behavior and draw conclusions about what people want and need.

Create models to examine complex problems – leveraging customer journey maps and other design models to explore and present alternative, non-linear ways of looking at and overcoming a problem.

Use prototypes to explore potential solutions – design-centric companies aren’t shy about tinkering with ideas in a public forum and tend to iterate quickly on prototypes—an activity that the innovation expert Michael Schrage refers to as “serious play.”

Tolerate failure – a design culture is nurturing. It doesn’t encourage failure, but the iterative nature of the design process recognizes that it’s rare to get things right the first time. Apple leverages failure as learning, viewing it as part of the cost of innovation.

Design Leading to Business Innovation

That said, design-led strategy isn’t easy, as Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, and Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, point out in “Design for Action.” They describe how complex innovations often encounter stiff resistance from intended beneficiaries and those delivering the new product or service, because they jarringly disrupt existing behaviors and business models.

The solution, the authors propose, is to treat the launch of a disrupter as a design challenge in itself—a process they call intervention design. What’s the ultimate place for design in an organization? Nooyi sums it up like this: “Design leads to innovation and innovation demands design.”

Consider this example: A couple of years ago, MassMutual was trying to find innovative ways to persuade people younger than 40 to buy life insurance—a notoriously hard sell. The standard approach would have been to design a special life insurance product and market it in the conventional way, but MassMutual concluded that this was unlikely to work. Instead the company worked with IDEO to design a completely new type of customer experience focused more broadly on educating people about long-term financial planning.

Launched in October 2014, “Society of Grownups” was conceived as a “master’s program for adulthood.” Rather than delivering it purely as an online course, the company made it a multichannel experience, with state-of-the-art digital budgeting and financial-planning tools, offices with classrooms and a library customers could visit, and a curriculum that included everything from investing in a 401(k) to buying good-value wine.

That approach was hugely disruptive to the organization’s norms and processes, as it required not only a new brand and new digital tools but also new ways of working. In fact, every aspect of the organization had to be redesigned for the new service, which is intended to evolve as participants provide MassMutual with fresh insights into their needs.

Wrap-Up

Innovation, by its very definition, represents new ideas, methods, products and processes brought about through change, revolution and transformation. Design, as an act or a representational outcome, is the purest form of innovation facilitation.

Taking design principles from the drawing board to the boardroom is not an easy transition, but it is necessary if an organization is to be successful in transforming innovation into sustainable competitive advantage. Having delivered such outcomes on behalf of clients across diverse industries such as travel, telecommunications, apparel and entertainment, we can attest to the importance of a top-down embracing of design thinking.

Ready to learn more and experience truly transformative growth, contact us for a complimentary consultation.

This little ditty was originally posted back in Q1-2014, but we just recently found the need to refresh the message for a new audience.

More and more often, we are being asked this very question by clients looking to ride the next wave in an effort to extract maximum value from their digital businesses. While Big Data is unquestionably a hot topic and term du jour, it is also something worthy of our client’s interest.

According to SAS, Big data is a popular term used to describe the exponential growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured. And big data may be as important to business – and society – as the Internet has become. More data ostensibly leads to more accurate analysis that then leads to more confident decision making and better decisions can mean greater operational efficiencies, cost reductions and reduced risk.

According to Webopedia, Big Data is the term used to describe a massive volume of both structured and unstructured data that is so large that it’s difficult to process using traditional database and software techniques. In most enterprise scenarios the data is too big or it moves too fast or it exceeds current processing capacity.

Big data is new and “ginormous” and scary –very, very scary. No, wait. Big data is just another name for the same old data marketers have always used, and it’s not all that big, and it’s something we should be embracing, not fearing. No, hold on. That’s not it, either. What I meant to say is that big data is as powerful as a tsunami, but it’s a deluge that can be controlled . . . in a positive way, to provide business insights and value. Yes, that’s right, isn’t it?

After much dialogue and debate, Ms. Brown put forth the following simplified definition: Big data is a collection of data from traditional and digital sources inside and outside your company that represents a source for ongoing discovery and analysis.

Excuse the pun, but the “big” distinction for data today comes from the volume, velocity, variety, variability and complexity. The first three were first defined by Gartner analyst, Doug Laney, whereas the others were added on after the fact my other industry players.

Many factors contribute to the increase in data volume. Transaction-based data stored through the years. Unstructured data streaming in from social media. Increasing amounts of sensor and machine-to-machine data being collected. In the past, excessive data volume was a storage issue. But with decreasing storage costs, other issues emerge, including how to determine relevance within large data volumes and how to use analytics to create value from relevant data.

Data is streaming in at unprecedented speed and must be dealt with in a timely manner. RFID tags, sensors and smart metering are driving the need to deal with torrents of data in near-real time. Reacting quickly enough to deal with data velocity is a challenge for most organizations.

In addition to the increasing velocities and varieties of data, data flows can be highly inconsistent with periodic peaks. Is something trending in social media? Daily, seasonal and event-triggered peak data loads can be challenging to manage. Even more so with unstructured data involved.

Today’s data comes from multiple sources. And it is still an undertaking to link, match, cleanse and transform data across systems. However, it is necessary to connect and correlate relationships, hierarchies and multiple data linkages or your data can quickly spiral out of control.

While the word “Big” is certainly a noteworthy distinction, acquiring data from all relevant sources and transforming it into actionable information has always been mission critical. It was true back in 1996 when building a B2B eCommerce business unit on behalf of Panasonic and it remains true today as we position clients such as Sony Music for success through the deployment of integrated business intelligence teams.

Now that we’ve provided a better understanding of what big data is, our next installment will focus on keys to succeeding in the Big Data-verse. Stay tuned!

Digital transformation is one of the most important topics facing retail today. As one of the largest retail brands in the U.S., second only to Walmart, Kroger Co., a Fortune 25 company with over $100 billion in revenue, is two years into its digital journey. Kroger is making the transformation from its traditional roots as a sole brick and mortar company into starting to build out the omni-channel and digital commerce experience for customers.

While we typically prefer to produce original content rather than “republish” the works of others, this piece by Vala Afshar, CMO at Extreme Networks and contributor to the Huffington Post, was simply too good not to share with our DB&G regulars. Kudos to Vala for his interview recap and Shashank Saxena for his applied insights.

Leading this digital transformation at Kroger is Shashank Saxena, the Director of Digital and eCommerce technology at Kroger. As part of this role he manages the Web, Mobile, Tablet, e-commerce and shared service app development teams in growing the digital presence of the Kroger brand and looking at how they can connect and serve their customers digitally. Working on his second digital transformation for a Fortune 25 company (prior to Kroger he was at Citigroup), this veteran sheds some light onto the hot topics of retail, digital, analytics, user experience and business models and provides an inside view on what’s driving the change and how retail is going about in responding to this new environment.

6 Trends that will Shape Digital Transformation in Retail:

Use customer feedback for evolutionary change. Saxena says that customer feedback is absolutely critical, and in terms of understanding the customer needs they are very focused on what their customers are asking for. But as Kroger starts looking at what they want to build from an innovation standpoint, it is very different from just catering to a customer’s needs.

Innovation is pretty different in my opinion. Innovation and digital transformation generally can happen in one or two ways. Either you go ahead and innovate through evolution, which is step features and functions, or through revolution. We’ve seen the industry go ahead and do both.

He categorizes innovations that change the way we do business, like the iPhone, as revolutionary innovations, whereas small step feature functions and enhancements that improve the product but do not fundamentally change the way something was done, he categorizes as evolutionary innovations.

At Kroger, customer feedback works really great in terms of evolutionary step feature innovations and is a very critical driving point in terms of what goes out in the next release on the product roadmap. And that’s not just for Kroger, but that’s across the board and in any industry where good product managers listen to customer feedback and incorporate feedback to evolve the product in the next release.

Saxena explains:

We are very focused on our customers and our customer feedback is a great thing. We try to incorporate that and evolve our products in that way, but we keep the distinction very clear in terms of when we are trying to be revolutionary versus evolutionary.

Pay attention to macro-economic trends. While customer feedback is the center of everything they do, as it should be that way for all companies and industries, Saxena says that over and above that, you also need to start factoring in macro-economic trends. Not just the overall trends impacting retail, but trends that impact digital in particular. According to Saxena, the rise of the value shopper, the rise of the millennials and the boom in the health and wellness are macro-economic trends that are starting to shape digital transformation in retail. Yet across all industries we’ve see the explosion of data, the emergence of platforms and the rise in mobility.

Saxena shares this astounding fact:

Since I woke up this morning and up until the time when this Google hangout session began, there has been more content uploaded on YouTube then content that Hollywood has produced in its 100+ years of its entire existence.

This is why understanding the trends and what’s going on with data explosion is really critical. In his opinion:

As important as customer feedback is, it’s not going to go ahead and explain the trends to you. Companies need to understand the macro-economic trends and start using them in a very focused way to add value to the life of the customer.

Evolve business models to meet customer preferences. In the last five years or so, in addition to technology innovation, we are starting to see business model innovation. Saxena points to Airbnb and Uber as examples of business model innovation because they are not hard-core tech innovations since the technology powering them is pretty simple for the most part. But what is innovative is actually the business model and how it’s funded with low infrastructure cost, low start-up costs and crowdsourcing economies which has become the transformational piece of it.

Saxena says:

At Kroger, we think about business model innovations pretty often and we are starting to see that emerge more and more. But we also think about it in terms of how do we personalize our offerings, because personalization is a key differentiator and another emerging trend that we are seeing and business models will evolve as they start understanding customer preferences, or rather the change in customer preferences.

Drive value, not features. “We look at competitors, but we don’t obsess over competitors because we’re so obsessed with our customers that we focus on customer needs and what our customer is asking for,” says Saxena. This is why he is slow to jump on the push notification bandwagon, even though he is constantly bombarded with the idea. He feels that launching a push notification where customers walk past the shelves of Tide and they receive an alert saying a dollar off Tide is a great feature that comes with a lot of other downstream implications.

Saxena believes that driving customer value is very different from bombarding customers with features because it’s only a matter of time before the customer will be turned off. The value Kroger offers is very different. They incentivize customers to buy the things they buy often, not trying to cross sell and upsell them. They have a successful program called LCM Mailers where they send coupons to customers for the products that they buy.

Says Saxena:

We are so focused on what our customers want and what they buy often that we just want to go ahead and help them buy more of that or get what they want and not necessarily have them brand switch or try to monetize on top of that.

That’s one thing I believe that Kroger does really well and we believe in the customer, which is why we keep track of what competitors are doing, but are not obsessed with our competitors.

Bring on the data. With today’s connected customer being a lot more informed in terms of what they are doing, Kroger supports that behavior and drives analytics and insights around customer behavior and customer purchases.

Internally when we try to decide what to launch for the customer and what should go next on the product roadmap, the famous quote we have is, ‘In God we trust. Everyone else must bring data,’ because we want to be a very data driven retailer and we try to leverage insights in terms of what the customer is asking for and what we should be catering next to the customer.

Don’t mess with the core brand. As someone who has spent time talking about lean organizations, Saxena says that the fundamental difference between big companies and The Lean Startup is that customer expectations are very different when a big company that has a well-known brand goes to market with a product. From a big company, the expectations are different because the brand promise says something. Yet Saxena points to the fact that every big company was small at one point when it started, meaning that essentially every big corporation was a startup at some point, and the way it became big was with repeatable, executable processes that scale.

These repeatable, executable processes are very counter intuitive to innovation, because customers expect consistency from big companies.

When a person choses to buy a brand, what you really need to understand from a customer mindset is they are opting for security over the unknown. There may be a product offering on the same shelf right next to your preferred brand for half the price. But when you are willing to pay the price premium, what you’re opting for is security. You’re trying to mitigate the risk of the unknown.

This is why trying to experiment with your core brand, may or may not be productive. It could work, but if it doesn’t, you’ve lost a valuable customer. How you innovate, how you chose to innovate and where you chose to experiment become critical factors when you talk about big companies.

Saxena manages the tension between maintaining the stability of traditional grocery retailing and the need to shift and make changes based on data and these macro-economic trends by identifying areas where they can experiment versus areas where they don’t want to run experiments. For big companies to create that startup culture around innovation and brainstorming, Saxena advises that it has to be done in a very controlled environment. You can run experiments, but you need to avoid the core products which built the revenue base and experiment and innovate elsewhere.

In running controlled experiments, the art lies in mastering the process of setting a hypothesis, tracking and monitoring results and then going ahead and rolling it out mainstream, which is very different from going ahead and experimenting with your core brand values.

You can watch the full interview with Shashank Saxena here. Please join Vala Afshar and Michael Krigsman every Friday at 3PM EST as they host CXOTalk— connecting with thought leaders and innovative executives who are pushing the boundaries within their companies and their fields.

Over the years, we’ve talked at length about the importance of organic search success delivered via the long term application of SEO best practices, but we’ve really not said enough about paid search. That all changes today!

Truth be told, we recently wrapped up a wildly effective PPC holiday campaign on behalf of a boutique eCommerce client. During the course of planning, executing, analyzing and optimizing, we found ourselves educating the client and thought that we’d do the same for our broader audience.

Courtesy of the good folks at White Shark Media, the infographic below provides a good look at top tips for newbies to paid search. Enjoy and best of luck with your next paid search campaign!

Way back in 2012, we declared 2013 the breakout year of mobile marketing and commerce – lo and behold, we were spot on as both 2013 and 2014 have proven epic for the smaller screen. Going even further out on the limb, while dramatically broadening the scope of devices, we are ready (or at least strongly leaning in this direction) to declare 2015 the year in which the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes a reality.

So, what is the Internet of Things (IoT)?

A variety of definitions and perspectives exist for the IoT, but the simple answer is that Internet of Things represents a real-world construct in which interconnectivity expands far beyond typical computing devices into the enablement of virtually all systems, services, appliances, objects as well as animals and even people.

According to Wikipedia, the IoT can refer to a wide variety of devices such as heart monitoring implants, biochip transponders on farm animals, automobiles with built-in sensors, or field operation devices that assist fire-fighters in search and rescue. Current market examples include various flavors of home automation such as smart thermostat systems and washer/dryers that utilize WiFi for remote monitoring.

How big is the IoT?

According to Gartner, there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the Internet of Things by 2020. ABI Research estimates that more than 30 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the Internet of Things (Internet of Everything) by 2020. As per a recent survey and study done by Pew Research Internet Project, a large majority of the technology experts and engaged Internet users who responded—83 percent—agreed with the notion that the Internet/Cloud of Things, embedded and wearable computing (and the corresponding dynamic systems) will have widespread and beneficial effects by 2025. It is, as such, clear that the IoT will consist of a very large number of devices being connected to the Internet.

The payoff of this so-called Internet of Things could be staggering, especially for Bay Area tech companies, which already are jockeying to cash in on the trend. Research firm IDC predicts this shift will generate nearly $9 trillion in annual sales by 2020. By comparison, the total annual sales of the Bay Area’s 150 biggest technology companies in 2012 was $677 billion.

“This will be potentially the biggest business opportunity in the history of people,” said Janusz Bryzek, a vice president at San Jose-based Fairchild Semiconductor, who helped organize a gathering of international experts at Stanford in October to discuss the subject. “We are changing the Earth.”

How close are we to the realization of the Internet of Things?

As things ramp up for the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas next week, the buzz is clearly humming around both near and long term possibilities for the IoT. At the forefront of the conversation is Samsung:

In essence, Samsung’s idea is that just about every device you have — and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in — will be connected and talking to each other. On a basic level, Samsung imagines that you’ll be able to take off your headphones when you arrive home and have the music they were playing automatically start up through your speaker system. But Samsung also sees this connectivity extending outside of the home. When you go up to a digital kiosk, such as a map at a large mall, Samsung imagines that your phone might automatically connect to it and change the graphic’s language to whatever you primarily speak.

Fortunately, Samsung has already decided that all of its Internet of Things devices will be open. That means they won’t be locked within a Samsung ecosystem — something that might sound great from a business perspective, but would ultimately doom the products because consumers be required to buy all Samsung in order to receive the benefits. Instead, Samsung’s IoT products — and there are going to be a lot of them — will all be able to talk to any other Internet of Things device that wants to connect. That’s a big commitment from a company that makes everything from washers to smartphones to sensors.

“This is the digital lifestyle not just coming into concept but into practical execution,” said John Curran, managing director of communications, media and technology at the consulting firm Accenture. “The Internet of Things is touching almost every aspect of your life, and it’s bringing in a host of new companies and new partnerships.”

Examples of what is expected to be showcased at next week’s CES:

Nest will unveil a line of automated door locks, light switches and LED bulbs as well as WiFi-enabled ceiling fans controlled via its Learning Thermostat

Under Armour is expected to introduce a new line of smart sports apparel and connected workout clothing from Hexoskin will let trainers monitor athletes from afar — even from different countries.

Other devices are targeting a niche consumer base such as Tagg’s GPS-enabled pet trackers can report your pet’s location and the temperature there.

A variety of manufacturers will introduce devices built for Apple’s HomeKit home automation development platform – said devices will ultimately be controlled by iPhones and iPads

Ford’s new chief executive, Mark Fields, and Dieter Zetsche, the head of Mercedes-Benz, will give keynote addresses that focus on innovation in the auto industry, including advances in making cars smarter and eventually able to drive themselves.

The antivirus and security company Bitdefender will show off its just announced Bitdefender box, which plugs into a home network and can protect connected devices from malicious software.

A distinct commonality between Samsung’s vision and that of other players in this burgeoning ecosystem, including competitors, media members and technology analysts, is the year 2020. It would appear as though many are looking to a date 5 years from now as the true inflection point for the IoT. Today is more about exploration, innovation, building awareness, carving out a market and problem-solving…and the IoT is not without its issues.

Challenges to a global realization of the IoT

While seemingly unlimited possibilities and potential abound, not all view a proposed proliferation of connected things as imminent or even welcome down the road.

“Despite predictions of rapid growth for smart products in the near future, the Internet of Things has yet to secure a foothold in the mainstream consumer market,” notes a new exploratory case study by Affinnova, which asked consumers to evaluate more than 4 million product concept variations and identify the most desired products and functions. The company said its research sheds light “on key consumer preferences and barriers to mainstream adoption of smart products.”

One such barrier is a lack of understanding of what smart products are available and what their advantages and limitations are. While 57 percent of all consumers strongly agreed that the Internet of Things will be “just as revolutionary as the smartphone,” they don’t know how or why—92 percent told Affinnova its very difficult to pinpoint what they want from smart objects, but feel that they’ll know it when they see it.

Also holding some consumers back is unease about whether collected data would be secure and private. “While one might expect life automation to be met with fervent enthusiasm, many consumers worry that Web-enabled technologies may not be reliable decision-making proxies yet; 41 percent fear smart products could take actions that they, as individuals, would not have chosen to make on their own,” Affinnova said.

In the opinion of Steve Ranger, UK editor-in-chief of ZDNet and TechRepublic, there are plenty of environments where the IoT makes a lot of sense – sensors on industrial systems or city-wide projects, for example. These might be less glamorous than the sentient dishwasher, but are providing better value than a plant pot that tweets when the soil dries out.

There are benefits to a consumer version of the IoT, of course, especially when it comes to helping an ageing population stay independent for longer, as one example. But all of us need to think much harder about the issues involved before the technology becomes mainstream. We need to decide what we think is appropriate for our IoT devices to do, or share, long before they become commonplace.

There are obvious security questions and privacy issues around the emergence of the IoT as well, which the industry has yet to resolve. Most people just about understand that their browsing behaviour online is repacked and sold on. But the data we generate as we move about our homes could be just as telling: will your habit of binge-watching boxsets in bed or midnight junk food refrigerator raids be used against you at some point?

In our humble opinion, Steve hit on most but not all of the key concerns and challenges impeding the true mass adoption of the IoT:

Awareness and Understanding – wrapping your head around what IoT is and what it really means for consumers

Security and Privacy – controlling the flow of information (did Google drop $3.2 billion on Nest to break into home automation or was the play more about acquiring valuable information about consumer behavior?)

Relevance – companies are rushing to release innovative new interconnected products, but do they get what is really relevant to the target audience? Electronically gauging soil moisture may be important to a winery in Napa but does my wife really need an urgent alert that her potted plant is 2% below the optimal water absorption level? On the other hand, tracking our beloved Husky’s whereabouts and overall health would be hugely important to us. Heck, I even love the ability afforded by LiftMaster to check in on and control my garage doors remotely.

True Open Connectivity – will all of the “things” on the Internet be truly connected through an open protocol as envisioned by Samsung or will we be relegated to picking a proprietary platform from the likes of Apple?

So, will this be the year of the IoT?

2015 will certainly be a key building block year for the IoT and the media will certainly crank up the hype machine, but the truth is that the big splash is still years away. This is not to say, however, that very real practical applications will not be hard at work this year. Both businesses and consumers will begin to feel the impact of IoT in 2015, but not to the extent that we will be able to declare 2015 as the year that witnessed the widespread conversion of science fiction to science fact.

For an insiders perspective, look no further than the major venture capitalists. According to Inc. and CB Insights, it’s still a really nascent market. More than two thirds of all Internet of Things companies have raised early-stage funding through seed and series A rounds, with a total of 56 early stage rounds in the past two years. For the three full years from 2011 through 2013, 173 companies raised early-stage funding worth $366 million. Nearly three quarters of that funding total, however, was raised in 2013. So far, however, there have been only two notable exits: those are wearable, high-definition camera maker and Inc. 5000 company GoPro, which went public in 2014 at a value of around $3 billion, and virtual reality headset creator Oculus, which Facebook purchased in 2014 for $2 billion.

The uptick in attention and activity is definitely there in 2015 and will ultimately fuel the true realization of the IoT in years to come. Jump on early and enjoy the ride…it’s going to be an amazing thing to experience. Happy New Year!

Deploying a new CMS for an existing site is often exciting, challenging and potentially devastating (from an SEO perspective). Detailed planning in advance of such a project is critical and must consider not only new requirements to take your organization to the next level, but also transition best practices in order to ensure business continuity.

Short of a precipitous drop in digital sales, nothing ruins your day more than watching your hard-earned organic rankings drive off a cliff thanks to a site redesign / redeployment. Having recently faced (and avoided) this ominous possibility in context of a client’s responsive (re)design project, we found the sage advice of SEO experts to be just what the doctor ordered. While not the deepest of dives, the following post from Glenn Gabe should certainly get you thinking as you prepare for your next site redesign / platform migration.

You Want Scary? I’ve Got Scary.

Before I begin, let’s take a look at a few graphs that will scare the daylights out of any digital marketer. These are actual graphs from companies I’ve helped after redesigns impacted SEO. They unfortunately didn’t foresee the massive impact a redesign or CMS migration could have on their search engine rankings and subsequent traffic. It’s not pretty when this happens.

A Steep Drop in SEO Traffic after a Website Redesign:

The Double Dip, SEO Traffic Dropping Twice After CMS Migration:

Without further ado, here are nine things you should be doing when working on a website redesign or CMS migration that can save your search engine power, rankings, and traffic. Again, this subset of topics is based on the top questions I received after my NJ CAMA presentation.

1. Crawl Your Site. Know Your Site.

When you redesign your website, there’s a good chance that URL’s will change. If URL’s change, you absolutely have to inform the engines where those older URL’s have moved to. If you don’t, you can destroy your SEO power. All of the equity those old URL’s have built up can be wiped out. And when that happens, your rankings drop, organic search traffic drops, sales drop, revenue drops, and heads roll. That’s why understanding all of your current URL’s is critically important.

The good news is that there are several ways to understand your current URL’s. I highly recommend you crawl your own site, which can reveal many of your current URL’s. I’ve covered Xenu Link Sleuth in the past here on Search Engine Journal, and it’s a great (and free) tool for completing this step. You can also use Screaming Frog to crawl your site, which is a paid solution. Once you crawl your site, export those reports and make sure everyone involved understands the website structure and the URL’s that need to be migrated (or redirected).

Quick Tip: Don’t forget your subdomains. I once performed an audit and found a subdomain with over 500 pages and over 1000 inbound links. Nobody involved in the project even knew the subdomain was active, and it would have gotten nuked during the migration.

Crawling Your Site Using Xenu Link Sleuth:

2. Perform an Inbound Link Analysis

Inbound links are incredibly important for building SEO power. And, there’s a huge risk in losing those powerful inbound links if you change your URL structure. I highly recommend performing an inbound link analysis to fully understand your link profile. Know the pages linking to you, and where they are linking. Then make sure your developers understand that those pages must be migrated. And make sure you utilize 301 redirects when pointing your old URL’s to your new ones. More on 301’s in the next section of this post. There are several tools you can use to perform an inbound link analysis, including Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO Tools. Get familiar with them, and don’t skip this step during a redesign or migration.

Analyzing Inbound Links Using Open Site Explorer:

3. The 301 Redirection Plan

This is the heart of your migration from an SEO standpoint. If there is one thing you need to get right during the redesign, it’s this step. As I’ve explained already, you need to make sure all of your older pages 301 redirect to their newer counterparts. 301 redirects will safely pass PageRank from your older pages to the newer ones, and will enable you to maintain your Search Equity. If you fail at this stage, your trending could very well look like the graphs I included earlier. Don’t botch the 301 redirection plan. You will pay dearly.

In addition, and this is extremely important, in order to prep for the migration, your developers should become familiar with .htaccess, mod_rewrite, and ISAPI_Rewrite. You will need to understand how to use them in order to issue 301’s, rewrite URL’s, etc.

Quick Tip: If you can keep the same URL structure as your original website when redesigning or migrating a website, do it! It will make your life a lot easier. If the URL’s remain the same, you don’t need to issue 301’s. And for larger sites, this can save you a lot of time and pain.

4. Have an SEO Audit Conducted, Understand What Needs to be Improved

I’ve written extensively about SEO Technical Audits before, and I believe they are the most powerful deliverable in SEO. Having an audit completed prior to a redesign is an extremely smart move. It can help you identify the strengths, weaknesses, risks, and opportunities with the current website. You can figure out what should be migrated, and what can be left behind. You can find problems that need to be addressed, and risks that can potentially get you penalized down the line. And most importantly, it can help you build a road map of changes leading up to the redesign (and beyond).

5. Analyze Site Reporting (It’s right under your nose!)

When redesigning or migrating your website, you should absolutely analyze your current site reporting. Specifically, you can focus on the top content, landing pages, and referring sites reports. They will help you gain a solid understanding of which pages are visited most, which are the top landing pages, and which pages are receiving the most referring traffic. And by the way, if you have landing pages receiving referring traffic, then that means there are external links pointing to those pages. And I already mentioned how important retaining Search Equity is. Once you analyze these reports, make sure you export them from your analytics package so everyone involved knows which pages have to be migrated to the new site.

Analyzing Site Reporting During a Redesign:

Quick Tip: Want to export over 500 records from a report, but Google Analytics is limiting your export? Simply edit the querystring parameter explorer-table.rowCount%3D50/ to a higher number. Then export your report. You’ll be able to export more than 500 rows. For example, explorer-table.rowCount%3D1000/ would export 1000 rows.

6. Don’t Drop Optimization During the Redesign or Migration

Imagine you have 500 pages of optimized content on your current website. You have strong rankings and traffic, and life is good. Then you redesign your site, and drop most of your on-page optimization when the redesign is launched. Needless to say, your rankings and traffic could suffer greatly. I wish this was rare, but it’s not. Many times, marketers don’t understand the power of on-page optimization, keyword research performed in the past, uniquely optimized pages, etc. Then the new pages either have the same general optimization across the site, or a scaled down version.

And by the way, your CMS package might force this issue (more on this soon.) So, a redesign is a great time to review your current optimization, document it, and make sure your new pages contain that optimization. You can use several tools to analyze content optimization, including browser plugins like SearchStatus, SEO Site Tools, etc. You can also view optimization via the crawler tools I mentioned earlier, like Xenu Link Sleuth. Your on-page analysis at this stage is also a great way to find potential optimization issues.

7. Set up Webmaster Accounts!

This topic really seemed to get a lot of people jotting down notes during my presentation. I still find many companies that don’t have webmaster accounts set up (which is crazy). Both Google and Bing provide webmaster tools, which can be incredibly valuable for webmasters. You can verify ownership of a website, analyze diagnostics for the sites you own, view search queries and click-through data, etc. In addition, you can receive messages directly from the engines. Yes, Google and Bing will send you messages when something is wrong.

But, for redesigns, there is also a very important piece of functionality in Google Webmaster Tools. You can actually tell Google when you are moving domains! So, for the love of Search, tell Google you are moving domains! In addition, using both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can monitor your site prior to, during, and then after a migration. It’s a great way to make sure everything is going well. And if it’s not, you will know, and you can adjust your plan.

Moving Domains in Google Webmaster Tools:

8. Vet Content Management Systems (CMS)

Many companies get tired of custom web solutions, static pages, and disjointed internal systems, and subsequently move to a content management system (CMS) to ease the pain. But the promise of efficiency can sometimes turn into a real nightmare SEO-wise. Unfortunately, the wrong CMS platform can absolutely crush your search engine rankings. You might think that the move to a CMS would help, but it could actually cause more problems. The good news is the proof is in the pudding. You need to perform your due diligence when analyzing CMS packages.

I highly recommend auditing websites that are actively running the CMS platforms you are considering. Even a lite SEO audit would produce a wealth of information about how the CMS performs SEO-wise. You should also get references, and several of them. Speak with actual customers that have migrated to the CMS. See how the migration went. Learn what the SEO impact was. And ask what they would do differently. Those conversations could save your own migration.

9. Great Design and Programming Ability Does Not Translate to Great SEO

When planning your new site, don’t fall into the trap of adding the latest technology or functionality when that very technology could hurt your search engine rankings. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some incredible web developers and designers over the years. Some were award-winning creative professionals. But, that didn’t mean they were SEO experts. Actually, I found that knowing enough to be dangerous…was really dangerous.

Make sure your developers understand the impact of what they are crafting. For example, AJAX, JavaScript, forms, robots.txt, the use of the canonical URL tag, meta robots tag, etc. I wrote a post on Search Engine Journal a few months ago explaining how one line of code could destroy your search engine rankings. Once you read that post, you’ll understand how easy it is to damage SEO. Make sure you vet each change and addition to the website prior to the changes going live. Don’t let new technology slip through without SEO approval.

Summary – Preparing for Redesigns and CMS Migrations is Critically Important

As you can see, there are several important topics to understand while going through a website redesign or CMS migration. Unfortunately, many companies aren’t aware of these items, and subsequently lose SEO power, search engine rankings, natural search traffic, and sales. That said, if you plan accordingly, and get the right players involved from the start, you can be successful.

Innovation is typically synonymous with the concept of “thinking outside of the box”, but in this case e-commerce is experiencing a subtle revolution by focusing on what is possible “inside the box”. Said “box” is the 3D printer, itself, and there exist big time opportunities that present themselves when combining digital designs with physical substrate. How big is big? Well, estimates from industry groups indicate that 3D printing will become a $3.7 billion business by 2015.

As noted in Avi Reichental’s video tutorial, 3D printing has the power to make anything possible by democratizing creativity and localizing (as in DIY at home) manufacturing using many types of materials through an additive vs. subtractive process.

GIVING A FRESH LOOK TO E-COMMERCE

A wonderful example of how these capabilities are transforming e-commerce is the case in the cosmetics industry of Mink.

Here’s a little secret that the cosmetics industry doesn’t want you to know: the base materials for most makeup, from the cheapest lip gloss to the highest-end eye shadow, is basically the same. The markup comes from either the brand name or a lack of scale for a particular color. Larger outlets like CVS or Walmart buy only the hues that sell the best so they can order in bulk and score a discount. Mink hopes to bring the entire industry to its knees by eliminating all that nonsense. It’s a 3D printer that mixes ink with powder, cream or whatever other raw material necessary to create an endless variety of cosmetics on your own desk.

Mink is the brainchild of Grace Choi, a self proclaimed serial inventor who came up with the idea while at Harvard Business School. The hardware itself is proprietary, but it uses the standard image editing software already on your computer to actually print. You can pick a color from any where — a website, a YouTube video, a photo you took — and then drop the hexcode for the color into Photoshop or even MS Paint. Fill a canvas with the color of your choice, hit print and wait just a few minutes while Minx mixes up a fresh batch of makeup just for you.The appeal is obvious: consumers could have an entire custom cosmetic store at their disposal in a small desktop printer.

E-COMMERCE OPPORTUNITIES ABOUND WITH 3D PRINTING

As the price of 3D printers continues to fall, new opportunities are emerging, especially for ecommerce vendors. Several dedicated online stores sell 3D printers, materials, and finished products, while others see marketplaces for finished products as the best business model. Last year, eBay rolled out an iPhone application, eBay Exact, that allows customers to buy customizable printed merchandise from three 3D printing companies. Walmart also has a 3D printing service pilot program. Etsy has 13 pages of 3D-printed objects for sale.

Certainly the bigger e-commerce players are looking beyond just selling physical products, taking the 3D printing concept into the service arena. If successful, this approach could radically change e-commerce, with merchants selling designs that allow consumers to manufacture their own customized products.

Earlier this year, Amazon established a 3D product store with a partner, 3DLT, which now offers 73 products on Amazon — mostly jewelry and accessories for electronic goods. Amazon also sells 3D printers and supplies. While 3D printers used to cost several thousand dollars, several models now sell for under $600, making it feasible for people to buy them for home use. 3DLT is also a 3D printing template marketplace. It partners with independent designers who create the 3D printable files that 3DLT sells on its website to customers who download them and print products on their home 3D printers. For those without a home 3D printer, 3DLT has a partner network of over five hundred 3D retail printers where individuals can bring the files to be printed.

Several online marketplaces devoted exclusively to 3D printed goods (versus templates sold by 3DLT) also exist. Shapeways operates the world’s largest marketplace for 3D printed products. Designers, and hobbyists send their designs to Shapeways, which uses its in-house printers to create physical products. If the customer wishes to sell products in addition to creating just one, Shapeways adds the product to its online marketplace, where others can buy the goods. Shapeways handles payment processing and shipping.

Sculpteo also allows individuals to buy and sell designs as well as offering a printing service. Sculpteo reckons it has invented a new form of e-tailing by enabling designers to sell customized 3D printed objects directly to consumers and enabling e-commerce websites to become real manufacturers. Sculpteo’s 3D-printing Cloud Engine eliminates the need to use third parties to promote, market and manufacture goods that are directly delivered to consumers, as they can easily operate their own online shop directly from their own website.

ARE WE WITNESSING THE RISE OF CREATIVE COMMERCE (C-COMMERCE)?

According to Forbes, e-commerce is moving beyond just doing better of the same – it will be different. It will be a shift from a two-sided marketplace (BUY and SELL) to a dynamic makerplace (CREATE, BUY and SELL).

The growing Maker Movement, as spearheaded by the likes of Maker Media, and the trend toward participatory design are early signs of the shift to creative commerce. Crowdsourcing of designs is already quite common, and there are lightweight customization platforms that allow consumers to give T-shirts or sports gear a personalized design, for example, using platforms like Threadless, CafePress, and NikeID. Some of the most successful products of the past decade used community insights to drive product innovation, such as the revival of LEGO Mindstorms.

Creative commerce has existed for some time in a host of offline capacities—custom tailoring, craft workshops, farm-to-table. Its rise, however, is fueled by a combination of timely factors: open source, the accessibility of 3D printing, and the increasing connectedness of the Internet and the ease with which you can find your niche (shout out to Chris Anderson’s Long Tail).

DESIGN, DELIVERY AND OTHER DYNAMIC CHANGES TO E-COMMERCE

Designs for Sale:

Here’s where 3D printing might one day blow away manufacturing of the kind we’ve been used to since the Industrial Revolution shook up agrarian life in the early 19th century. 3D printing is creating a market in designs that are meant to be printed by the buyer — or a third-party manufacturer unrelated to the designer.

The end product isn’t sold — it’s the design that’s sold, along with a license for it to be printed. It’s like the demise of hard copies in the book, music and video industry — the intellectual property is all.

Buried in corners of the Internet are marketplaces where budding designers are selling their plans for printing at home or in the workplace. Customers can use their own printers or they can buy the design and have it printed on the marketplace’s printer and then delivered.

The printer offered at Staples is the Cube, made by 3D Systems, which pitches its Cubify website as a marketplace with departments such as Home, Fashion, and Toys & Games. For example, a 2×3-inch planter in the Home section, designed by Phroid, runs $5.00 if you print it yourself. Alternatively, you can pay $40.55 to have it made to your materials specification and color.

Delivery:

With the very real possibility of 3D printing proliferation, the giants of e-commerce can look forward to a slimmed-down supply chain which works on the just-in-time principle.

At a time when Amazon is making considerable investments in order to offer its customers delivery in under 24 hours, 3D printing services may be on the way to shortening the delivery chain. Amazon‘s Prime service offering free two-day shipping for eligible purchases is the company’s main trump card in relation to rivals such as eBay and Wal-Mart. Now, however, as 3D printing techniques are being perfected, the traditional supply chain based on warehousing goods is likely to change. However there will have to be many logistical and technical improvements before any real paradigm shift occurs in e-commerce order fulfillment.

One of the biggest competitive challenges in the e-commerce sector is delivery time, and the main platforms rely on networks of connected warehouses or else go into partnership with retail chains. The contest for best performance calls for constant innovation.For the moment, given the limited capabilities of 3D printing and the narrow range of materials that can be used, the current distribution model is not under serious threat.

Intellectual Property & Copyright Infringement: 3D printers have opened new doors to innovation but concurrently raised questions re: copyright infringement. According to Forbes @ CES 2014, one product which will soon change the world is 3D printing. Yet along with this innovation, 3D printing is facing legal challenges. Established players in manufacturing are going after user-generated 3D file sharing sites, arguing that their intellectual property is ripped off by home printers. But in many cases, home 3D printer aficionados are building out and improving upon original designs. Our copyright laws are unclear about the degree to which 3D designs and software are protectable, and what constitutes infringement.

Thingiverse, a website that allows people to post and share designs for 3D printers, has been fielding Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices since at least 2011. Rights holders need to move away from suing or threatening to sue every potential copyright violator, and embrace a system that makes it easy and affordable for at-home 3D printers to access legal and licensed designs. iTunes’ licensing model is a good example. Just as the recording industry has adapted to digital music downloads and found revenue in other areas like touring and merchandise, the creative content and manufacturing industries will have to adapt to 3D printing.

At The DBG Agency, we have been fortunate to work with both major players in the music industry and start-up companies in 3D printing. There are some similarities that are simply uncanny. Physical product manufacturers and multichannel retail platforms cannot allow themselves to make the same mistakes that ravaged the music industry as a result of its refusal to embrace, early on, new digital content / monetization models and recognize that the tail was now wagging the dog in terms of both consumers and artists vs. labels and distribution partners.

Change is coming to e-commerce thanks to 3D printing. D2C and retail players will either innovate and adapt, as is the case with Amazon, or they will be left wondering what happened to their place in the digital ecosystem as was the case with so many in the music industry.

After two days of conversations about social media with 25 of the world’s largest brands, perhaps the nicest benefit is that you don’t hear the same conclusions or experiences over and over. IMHO, the following recap raises some interesting points; none of which is as important as the concept of distilling the very popular “big data” into small, imminently actionable elements.

During the event, more than twenty panel discussions focused on everything from internal structures and training to content creation and lead generation. From the stage, though, there were many key themes that emerged from insights shared by speakers. Here are just a few of those themes:

Smart Brands Don’t Care About Social Media. Yes, I am using an intentional link baiting headline for my first point – but across the first several conversations about “weaving social into the fabric of business,” it was clear that the biggest brands are all thinking beyond the traditional idea that social is a place to create and distribute all kinds of media. Instead MetLife Head of eBusiness Amir Weiss, Adobe Exec Jeff Feldman and TradeKing CEO Don Montanaro all shared stories of how the idea of creating a “Social Business” goes far beyond content creation or social platforms and requires a new way of thinking about how social impacts everything from employee engagement to customer care.

Better Timing Is Everything. For anyone who has worked on lead generation campaigns – the typical response rates tend to hover somewhere between 3% and 15% – so when Restaurant.com CMO Christopher Krohn shared that his post-dining survey gets a response rate of close to 40%, it raised more than few eyebrows at the Summit. What’s the secret? It turns out giving people the survey immediately after they finished dining rather than waiting 24 hours made a crucial difference in how likely they were to share their experience by filling it out. Later in the event, multiple brands shared similar learnings around the importance of producing relevant and timely content that was either inspired by media and culture of the moment, or by being findable in the exact moment that someone most needed it.

Motivate and Train Employees Through Content. It is tempting to think of creating content as purely a marketing tactic to reach customers who are seeking information or utility – yet some of the most powerful examples of content creation at the Summit came from brands who were actively using it to train or motivate employees. Century21 CMO Bev Thorne shared that her organization actively uses internally created videos to train real estate agents on social media and answer the most frequently asked questions. Whole Foods Director of Social Media Natanya Anderson also shared multiple examples of how content, leaderboards and curated showcases were used to inspire independent store owners and others to more actively use social media by rewarding and recognizing the best performing examples from across their network of locations on a weekly basis.

Find A Way To Improve A Bad Experience. If there is one universal truth about moving, it’s that no one likes it. Packing all the things you own into boxes and then putting them on a truck (sometimes on your own) is never a fun experience. Yet U-haul Social Media Director Toni Jones shared a story of how her brand was able to turn that moment around by asking people to use the hashtag #myuhaul to share their photos of moving for a chance to be featured on the side of actual trucks in real life. The promotion took off because it added an element of fun to an experience that usually is just the opposite. In the process, the brand was able to make a deeper connection in an experience where usually people are given a forgettable experience by being treated as customers in a transaction and offered nothing more memorable to turn them into advocates.

Separate Content Creation From Distribution. It is easy to spend most of your time when it comes to content focusing on it’s creation. That is the hard part, of course. Yet when it comes to getting the content in front of the right people, distributing that content can be almost as big of a challenge. In a fascinating discussion between Huffington Post Brand Strategy Director Marcia Lesser, Marissa Pick from Euromoney and Amir Zonozi of Zoomph – one principle that emerged as being important was separating the act of creating engaging content from the process and method of distributing it. Jen Lashua, Intel’s Editor In Chief, shared a similar piece of advice – sharing that it is important to always try new pilot programs with untried platforms to see if they pay off. Some may be better for content creation, while others may work solely for distribution.

Don’t Forget Your Employee Advocates. Across multiple panel sessions throughout the conference a mixture of brand marketers like Dan Lewis from Molson-Coors and several software providers all pointed to perhaps one of the biggest missed opportunities in social media … activating employees. By one estimate, a core group of several thousand employees can generate the same reach as a million customers. Yet brands are typically not good at giving employees ways to learn about marketing efforts or to help promote them. Now there are more tools that allow for that to be managed centrally – and the ideal solution most speakers shared was some mixture of selecting the right tools/platforms and combining it with proactive and ongoing training.

Replace Big Data With Small Actionable Data. Despite the popularity of big data as a buzzword, several speakers pointed out that the way they are making sense of data is by getting better at knowing what data to ignore. Brands like Sprint, Whole Foods and McDonald’s are all seeking new ways to slice the data they do collect into pieces that are actionable and have more value for particular audiences. In many cases, this means pulling out different types of data and insights based on the audience you are aiming to share those metrics with. As time moves on, more brands will likely focus on this challenge of reducing the noise within big data collection to real meaning from those numbers. Once that happens, the value of data finally starts to translate into better insights to power marketing decisions.

The recap, itself, is provided courtesy of our friend Rohit Bhargava. Rohit spent more than a decade leading digital strategy at two of the largest marketing agencies in the world (Ogilvy & Leo Burnett) in the US and Australia. His client list has included Intel, American Express, Novartis, Pfizer, IBM, Unilever, Pepsi, Heineken, and dozens of other brands across multiple industries. In 2013, he started his own “concierge marketing” service (Influential Marketing Group) to offer more personalized Digital CMO style consulting for brands & selected startups.